Finding Fault With App Management

According to the Fifth Annual State of the Network Study released by Network Instruments, 83% of IT professionals surveyed said problem number one with application management is “determining whether problems are caused by the network, the system or the application.”

There are a couple of key challenges in terms of managing cloud applications, she says. "One is that you have to build an end-to-end picture of the transaction or application. Unless you have that [visibility], you don't know where to start in terms of actually solving application performance problems." But the challenge is being able to drill down and understand as many as 30 to 40 components supporting the application to determine the origin of a slowdown, for example.

In spite of the struggles APM vendors are having, Craig was also surprised by "how fast vendors are evolving products to address" the complexity during the timeframe she conducted her research. "There are constant updates and enhancements to cloud APM solutions," she says, "so it's a very rapidly evolving market." APM product vendors covered in the report include OpTier, AppDynamics, AppFirst, Aternity, CA, Compuware, Correlsense, eG Innovations, HP, IBM, INETCO, Nastel, Netuitive, New Relic, OPNET, Quest, SolarWinds and Splunk. More than 40 users of the products were interviewed for the report.

Application management issues, and their increasing complexity, are also a concern to customers of Sourcefire, a provider of network security, performance and application control solutions. Sourcefire introduced a next-generation intrusion prevention system at the recent RSA Conference 2012 in San Francisco and offers other technology to manage applications.

“We hear that continually that just seeing what’s out there [is critical] because it’s such a dynamic environment now,” says Dave Stuart, director of product marketing at Sourcefire. “They needed to be better able to identify the risks and the threats.”